>Day 10 of the special 3 hour regime change operation in Venezuela
>>525810243The regime was in fact changed innit?Maduro being presently locked up in US
>>525810243Except it did end in 3 hours and Venezuela is cooperating
>>525810661nobody knows whats going on which cant be good news. They toppled the statue of Saddam though that shit was tiiiight.
>>525810661>The regime was in fact changed innit?No.
>>525810721Does cooperating mean something different in spanish?
>>525810243Op is over, bro LMAO
>>525810909Thank you for your attention to this matter. >Before departure, U.S. citizens should take precautions and be aware of their surroundings. There are reports of groups of armed militias, known as colectivos, setting up roadblocks and searching vehicles for evidence of U.S. citizenship or support for the United States. U.S. citizens in Venezuela should remain vigilant and exercise caution when traveling by road.https://ve.usembassy.gov/security-alert-venezuela-january-10-2026-do-not-travel-to-venezuela-depart-immediately/
>>525811081Where’s the invasion op, bro?
>>525810770This is why Luigi is a retard. Another just fills the opening. No change.
>>525810243
>>525810243B-but he said they're in charge
>>525811153that will be next if they cant stabilize the infrastructure enough for the oil companies to run it.
>>525811284LMAO.>MUH INEVITABLE BOOTS ON THE GROUND>VERY SOOOOOOOON
>>525810243There are some changes because for the first time the Chavistas at the top are scared, they know that they do not count with the support of Venezuelans, China or Russia, that is why they Surround themselves with mostly Cubans bodyguards. However the main butcher of the regime Diosdado Cabello is still controlling the militias and those armed militias will shot anyone that disagrees or complain about anything. So, yes they are follow instructions because they are scared of the US specially Diosdado, he has a bounty on his head. As long as they believe Trump can go in and kill him, they will cooperate on most things, except of course, letting people express themselves freely.
>>525810661He wasn't even Venezuelian. Maduro is cuba guy
>>525811352guess well just wait and see. Dont count your puppet governments till the end of the executions.
>>525811585Just like we put boots on the ground on Iran last year? Oh right, never happened.
>>525810243Yeah I'm getting impatient. Not enough stuff has happened in 2026 yet.
>>525810661Nope.Everyone else except for his very much dead Cuban presidential brigade its still here.At least they started to release some political hostages, but shit its starting to look grim since they stopped a few days ago, then started to release them dead and rotten, or brain dead.
>>525810721
>>525810243Worst forced meme ever. At least the 3-day SMO meme is factual and evidence-based
>>525810243He declares himself the president on TwitterThat looks like régimen change to me
>>525813125This can only be fixed with Diosdado out of the picture. That fucker knows the seed of hate he planted on millions of people, if the chavista regime falls, there is no hope for him and his family.
Transcript of the Ezra Klein interview with Jonathan Blitzer:I have one question right now: What is America doing in Venezuela? Over the weekend, on Jan. 3, the Trump administration launched an operation that ended with the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela.We’ve heard a lot of reasons from the Trump administration about why they decided to do this: Maduro is not a good guy. He’s an oppressive, brutal dictator who has made the lives of many people miserable. But there are a lot of brutal, repressive dictators in this world.Venezuela is not a leading supplier in America’s fentanyl crisis.Venezuela’s oil reserves are not an easy source of future wealth or power for the United States. (And oil should not be a reason to invade another country anyway.)President Donald Trump ran for office promising fewer foreign entanglements. He wanted to be remembered as a peacemaker.
>>525813687So what are we doing, watching President Trump stand onstage, saying: America is now running Venezuela? That the people standing behind him are now running Venezuela? And then watching Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and interim national security adviser, try to walk that back?This was a profound gamble from the Trump administration. Trump ran for office this time promising an end to these kinds of gambles, criticizing those that previous presidents had made in the past.So what are the arguments, views, interests, factions that led America to this point? And what comes after it?Joining me is Jonathan Blitzer, who has covered immigration and the Trump administration in Central America for The New Yorker. He has profiled Stephen Miller and gone deep into the drug-boat bombings the Trump administration has been executing. He is also the author of the excellent book “Everyone Who Is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis.”
>>525813737>Ezra Klein: Jonathan Blitzer, welcome to the show.Jonathan Blitzer: Thanks for having me.>Who is Nicolás Maduro? How should we understand what he represents and was?Maduro has always been, to my mind, a middling figure who attached himself to his predecessor, Hugo Chávez — who was a transformative, obviously highly controversial figure in Venezuela, who nationalized the oil industry, who made improving the lives of the poor a central plank of his political agenda but also consolidated power in all kinds of ways, flirted with violating the Constitution, and so on.Maduro was essentially a member of that administration and became Chávez’s appointed successor when Chávez became sick with cancer and died. So Maduro took power in 2013 but never had the charisma of Chávez. Almost immediately when he took office, you had things start to change the fortunes of the country. You had the price of oil drop. There was an economic crisis. You started to have an increase in inflation that got steadily worse in the 2010s. You started to have a series of domestic flare-ups of mass protests, which Maduro responded to by cracking down on the population in increasingly aggressive ways. This was in 2014 and again in 2017.
>>525813829In 2015, the Venezuelan opposition won congressional elections and it seemed like they could really bring Maduro to heel. The response of Maduro and his inner circle was to essentially invalidate that victory of the opposition in Congress and to go on to try to neuter the power of the opposition. And what we saw in the years since was an increasingly brutal consolidation of power.So he’s someone who was always a weak personal replacement to Chávez, who channeled all of Chávez’s darkest, most repressive urges and has basically been at the helm during a period where the country has really disintegrated in many ways.Since 2014, you have close to 8 million Venezuelans who have fled the country. That’s all during Maduro’s time as leader.
>>525812323I see.Hope Trump does the right thing and goes all the way through.
>>525810243BRICSniggers are self destructing >assad cucked >maduro cucked>iran in flames>Trump with new sanctions now targeting brasil >russian army in tatters>russian oil tankers now being targeted >south africa collapsing>indians more hated than ever before>leftists being shot in the streetBRICSniggers can only cope
>>525813946>Donald Trump has been talking about deposing Nicolás Maduro since his first term. Why? And why didn’t it happen then?The most interesting thing to those of us following Trump’s stance on this issue during his first term was that there were real hawks and hard-liners in his first administration who were pushing for more aggressive direct action in Venezuela and in the region — and the person who was uncomfortable moving forward was Trump. He was skeptical of the idea of putting boots on the ground. He was skeptical of the idea of overextending American involvement in the region. So probably the most striking thing has been his change from Trump 1.0 to Trump 2.0.But the Venezuela issue has always loomed large for him. Part of that is just purely political: The South Florida Republican Latino community — which is obviously very important to him and is important among a lot of his supporters and administration members — has always really been fixated on Venezuela. They see the Venezuelan regime as being the key to unlocking the downfall of socialist regimes across the region — in Cuba, above all, but also in Nicaragua.So there has always been a real appetite for high-flying, saber-rattling rhetoric on the issue. Trump initially understood the priority of Venezuela in those terms — as a political imperative.
>>525811391>Diosdado Cabello Why not send in a SAD hitter squad or delta team to take him out?
>>525814010>But the idea that we did this for political support in southern Florida doesn’t track for me. There have been too many players involved. Donald Trump is not running for re-election again — probably.>What were the conceptions of American interests at play?There’s no question that oil is a huge interest for Trump and something that he’s always been fixated on.It bothered him, and it bothered people in his inner circle, that Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, nationalized large parts of the country’s oil sector and essentially forced out American and international companies in the 2000s.So there’s been this idea that American capitalist interests have been dispossessed and that it’s a matter of recouping what was lost. There’s a sense of opportunity there.I also think that he’s someone who has grand designs for asserting American influence in the region as a reflection of his political power.The Venezuela issue has always been an opportunity for him to do that on a big international stage, to really be the bully that he’s wanted to be.
>>525814075>Tell me about the oil and geopolitics side of this. Because that does seem to have been quite compelling to Trump himself.The thing that I’ve heard is that inside the administration there was tension from the very start of the current term. On the one hand, there were hard-liners like Rubio and that broader delegation of Rubio-aligned members of Congress wanting the administration to take increasingly aggressive action against Venezuela, and roll back some of the easing of the sanctions done during the Biden administration.The Biden administration created a special exception for Chevron to continue to do some measure of business in Venezuela. And it seems like, at a certain point, the threat was made to Trump that these members of Congress would block or drag their feet on the so-called “big, beautiful bill,” his big domestic spending bill, if he didn’t chart a harder course against Venezuela.So, in one sense, he was responsive to all of those things and conscious of the need for everyone to be in lock step, particularly around that big domestic spending bill.At the same time, he was very concerned about the idea of Chevron losing its foothold at a time when a lot of observers will point out that the U.S. hard line against Venezuela has allowed other countries like Russia, Iran and China to establish increasing influence, both in Venezuela and over the Venezuelan oil industry.
>>525814126So there was this plan to try to manage both things. And I think in some ways, the aggression that we’ve seen is an outgrowth of the administration trying to square that particular circle.Trump ostensibly acceded to the demands made by hard-line anti-Maduro Republicans in Congress to continue to keep these sanctions, to roll back some of the Biden administration allowances on Chevron’s activity in the region.Then, by the time that bill had passed, by the end of July, you have the White House signing this legal memorandum to essentially justify, or at least set in motion, the start of these boat bombings.So I think Trump thinks very actively about the oil issue. What’s unclear to me is what he’s hearing from advisers about the difficulty of propping back up the Venezuelan oil industry.The big problem has been that Venezuela is responsible for less than 1 percent of the world’s overall oil output. It’s producing half of what it used to produce per day in the ’90s. So re-establishing the industry is going to require a huge amount ——>I’ve seen things like $60 billion of investment, over a long period of time, in a place where we don’t know its long-term stability. We don’t know what Venezuela is going to look like after this in five or 10 years.
>>525812323top kek
>>525814167>The track record of deposing the leader we don’t like, and everything is going to be stable and aligned to American interests for the foreseeable future, is not great.American oil companies, by the way, are extraordinarily risk averse. It’s not lost on them. First of all, the Iraq example is looming large in their minds. But also, all of these questions about the long-term American plan for Venezuela — that no one really can answer — militate against these companies getting involved in the oil sector right now, given the unpredictability of what’s ahead.>You’ve talked about this as, in part, a Stephen Miller theory — that there is an effort to establish what one might call deterrence or fear among every leader in the Western Hemisphere, and that Venezuela was, for a variety of reasons, the best example to use.>When we talk about Venezuela, we’re not really just talking about Venezuela. We’re talking about making an example of Venezuela such that every other leader in Latin America acts differently when Trump rattles his saber in the future.That’s exactly right. That’s always been the case with Venezuela. When we talk about Venezuela, we’re never just talking about Venezuela.
>>525810661Lol no, they replaced chavismo with chavismo>>525813951You forgot your memeflag
>>525810661Nah, the USA just snapped the retard in charge.They literally expected the government to collapse if Maduro was taken and are still pretending it has and they're controlling it. There was no plan after this. Turns out you actually need to a presence to change a government, who knew?
>>525814279One former Trump official said to me at the start of the boat bombings late last year that, insofar as any foreign government was looking at those bombings and scratching their heads and wondering: What is the message here? Is this going to come around for us? — well, mission accomplished. If the idea is to scare everyone and to make everyone feel that Trump is crazy enough to do anything, then his actions are achieving some desired effect.The interesting thing about Miller’s involvement in this is — as someone who covered the administration during the first Trump term ——>And profiled Stephen Miller.And spent a lot of time trying to understand Miller’s role in the government then and now — is that he was not someone who was anywhere near this issue during Trump 1.0, which is unsurprising to those who know Stephen Miller as Trump’s immigration adviser and a hard-liner on domestic issues.What I think has changed, and what’s been interesting to see this go-round, is how Miller has inserted himself into this space.When this current administration took shape and you saw someone like Marco Rubio as secretary of state, I think it stood to reason that the administration was going to take a series of very aggressive actions in the region, and specifically vis-à-vis Venezuela, because Rubio has always been a really ideological player in this space, both when he was a senator and obviously now.
>>525814329He’s someone who has always seen the Maduro regime as illegitimate — which he’s not wrong to do, particularly after Maduro lost the 2024 election and declared himself the winner. But going back years and years, Rubio has always had an ax to grind with the Cuban government. He has always been among the hardest-line Republicans on these issues, although he’s particularly well versed in them.So he’s a complicated player in all of this. It’s unsurprising that a Trump administration with Rubio as secretary of state would be angling for regime change in Venezuela. But what I think has surprised me is the degree to which Miller’s putting his thumb on the scale for intervention changed the development of the administration’s position in the late summer of last year.Miller is chiefly obsessed with immigration. And to someone like Miller, the situation in Venezuela is responsible for a huge influx of Venezuelan migrants that really exploded during the years of the Biden administration. So it’s not surprising that he would be interested in the region in that way. But another thing that he’s always really fantasized about was using increasingly broad military-style powers for the president to crack down on immigration enforcement in the United States. And the Venezuela issue represents a nexus for him and to that way of thinking.One of the first things the administration did in 2025 was invoke the Alien Enemies Act, an extremely obscure 18th-century law that basically has only ever been invoked during wartime.The United States, obviously, at the start of 2025, was not in any war. And yet the logic that Miller put forward, and that the administration adopted, was to say that mass migration represented a kind of hostile foreign invasion. That was defined primarily in terms of Venezuela.
>>525814294>You forgot your memeflagYou dont want trump to remove the Chavista regime?
>>525810726What are you going on about? Take your adderal
>>525814370So a lot of the most aggressive immigration actions taken in the United States were taken over the last year and a half in reference to Maduro, in reference to the idea that he posed some sort of hostile threat to the United States.In fact, the whole premise of Miller’s thinking was that if we bomb these boats and if the Venezuelan government reacts harshly, then we can make some kind of claim that we are in a state of open hostility with this country, and therefore need to take more dramatic action within the country.You have 600,000 Venezuelans living in the United States with temporary protected status. You have at least 100,000 other Venezuelans who came into the United States during the Biden years through a parole program, which was always going to leave them in a precarious position because that was just a program designed to get them into the country lawfully. They would then have to apply for some more-lasting status. Those people are living in an intense sort of limbo right now. A lot of their work authorizations have been canceled. So I think the Venezuelan population in the United States has always been a very ripe target.It should be said of Miller: He’s smart. The Venezuelan population is really ripe to be exploited because they’re people who had arrived recently, in the last couple of years, who are on the legal fringes with status that will eventually expire.
>>525814370My man literally no one is going to read those chatGPT walls of textI doubt even you read all of that before you posted itJust...
>>525814443The last thing I’ll say is something that I was guilty of dismissing a bit during the Biden years. I found myself in conversations with congressional Republicans during the Biden years who spoke very seriously about the idea of the U.S. bombing fentanyl labs in Mexico. I kind of rolled my eyes and thought it was a lark and just a bit of high-flying rhetoric while they were in the political opposition. It’s something that Trump had openly spoken about during his first term, and they were basically brought to heel by various establishment players like the Department of Defense ——>Well, very specifically, the secretary of defense.Correct.>That gets to something I want to talk a little bit about. We’re bringing in the staffing here. Every administration action is an emergent property of the people around the president and the president himself.
>>525814514>Tell me just a little bit about the difference between the staffing coalitions here in Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0, and the way those conversations ended up playing out.I think that’s everything. I think you’re right to identify that. The one response I get from everyone who had been involved in this issue during Trump 1.0 — which, ironically, includes people who ideologically are more predisposed to interventionism and regime change than some of the current players — is that in Trump 1.0, there was this constant sense: OK, key elements of the Defense Department are going to say we can’t do this.A former high-ranking State Department official during Trump 1.0 said to me yesterday that Trump and the more hawkish members of his cabinet were told on the first go-round that this has never been done before.That was a refrain that particularly bothered a lot of the real Trump loyalists, that they were told: No. You want to do this transformative thing, but it’s just not done.That was taken as a taunt and a challenge to some degree, certainly for someone like Miller. But that was the bottom line.And interestingly, in the current configuration of his advisers, there’s no one who could impose a meaningful check on Trump’s worst impulses — or on Miller’s worst impulses. The one person who represents a more establishment-grounded-type voice also happens to be one of the most ideological people in the administration on this particular issue — Marco Rubio.
>>525810243What a faggot cope postThe yanks haven't even started sucking up all that oil yet, Trump is too busy swinging his giant orange balls over the heads of various other nations, but they will make the vennies their new oil state serf territory and fuck off russia in a big way. Then they will go to some lame lefty court tribunal and win in international court about doing it too. You are just being a continental faggot about it even though
>>525811391> holy shit, a new butcherino just droppedHow many millihitlers exactly is this new Evil Butcher?
>>525814609That said, interestingly, at the start of the current administration, Miller brought up this idea of bombing fentanyl labs in Mexico. It was something that brought together all of his pet projects and ideological and, frankly, racial obsessions: the idea that the Mexican government was allowing cartels to export people and drugs into the United States.He was essentially told: This would be counterproductive in all of these ways. We actually have a pretty strong working relationship with the current Mexican administration. It’s not a relationship the Mexican government wants to tout particularly, but they’re doing everything we want them to do. They’ve helped us with drug interdiction. They’ve helped us increase enforcement along the border — all of these traditional things that the Mexican government has actually taken a very active role in doing behind the scenes. Why would we openly provoke them? They’re our largest trading partner. There would just be catastrophic downstream consequences if we were to take this kind of action there.So even in the current administration, that message was sent to someone like Miller. His response essentially was: OK, well, let’s find somewhere else to bomb.
>>525810243betty white lookin good
>>525810661The regime has and will not change because it is evident that it was already controlled by the US like the rest of the Americas.
>>525813687>Venezuela is not a leading supplier in America’s fentanyl crisis.Venezuela sending oil tankers to China, that come back with fentanyl on them. Venezuela may not be the “leading supplier” but they are guilty. Wipe them all off.>Venezuela’s oil reserves are not an easy source of future wealth or power for the United States. (And oil should not be a reason to invade another country anyway.)Yes, it will be. Considering you know nothing about oil drilling and procurement, this is laughable. (Why shouldn’t it be?)>President Donald Trump ran for office promising fewer foreign entanglements. He wanted to be remembered as a peacemaker.He will be. You will not be remembered, you are a parasite on mankind.
>>525814639>They didn’t just find somewhere else to bomb — they found something else to bomb.>This has been one of the strangest dimensions of the arguments around Venezuela: the high-profile bombing of the drug boats.>America has a profound fentanyl problem, and fentanyl comes from, among other places, China and Mexico. Fentanyl is very hard to stop because it is such a potent, synthesized, concentrated molecule that pocket-size amounts can — and do — kill huge numbers of Americans.>Meanwhile, the Trump administration appears to have moved to bombing cocaine smuggling. I’m not saying cocaine is great, but it was not a major issue in either the 2020 or 2024 election that America has a huge cocaine problem.>So there has been this weird movement from: We have this big fentanyl problem, and we need to do something about it. To now: We’re bombing these boats that are allegedly smuggling cocaine.>It’s perplexing.It’s perplexing if you try to disentangle it logically. It is extraordinarily cynical.Someone at the Defense Department had told me that, quite literally, the rationale was: We want to do something kinetic — the phrase they all love to use is “kinetic.” We want to do something that’s never been done before. We want to show that Trump is stronger and more serious than any of his predecessors. We’ll literally pick a different target.
>>525810820that's the USA telling US citizens to leaveit's not Venezuela telling the US to get out
>>525811391IF this is true, why not a single anti-chavismo protest in Venezuela, why all the anti-chavismo protestes were everywhere except in Venezuela?
>>525814805The bombing of those boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific is exactly that. To your point, the president comes out and says this is an act of self-defense, that drug overdoses are up, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died ——>They’ve actually fallen recently.That’s true.>But drug overdoses are high and a genuinely disastrous problem. But from fentanyl, primarily.One hundred percent. And as everyone points out, if you look at Coast Guard data, none of this is coming through the Caribbean. What’s more, the cocaine that’s coming through the Caribbean and the eastern part of the Pacific tends to have its destination as European cities, not American ones.So I don’t think there was any serious, substantive point behind selecting these targets as a matter of curbing the drug trade. I think it had a lot more to do with asserting a new, raw power and sending a broader message. But, yes, it’s utterly perplexing. It’s in many ways nonsensical.I have to say: Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras, who was charged and convicted in almost precisely the same way, short of the kind of military intervention that extracted Maduro from Venezuela. But he was someone who was charged in the Southern District of New York and was also held in Brooklyn. The people at the Department of Justice who worked on those charging documents and those investigations go back to Trump’s first term.
>>525815023One of the most prominent players in that investigation in the Southern District of New York was a guy named Emil Bove, who was a prosecutor in that division during Trump 1.0 and then eventually became Trump’s personal lawyer. He then served at a high level at the start of Trump’s second term in the Department of Justice and has since been nominated and confirmed as an appellate court judge.He was largely involved in helping prepare that research, showing how Juan Orlando Hernández had been involved in the drug trade. There wasn’t a lot of controversy around the charges brought against him.Nevertheless, Trump, at the end of November, in a move that, frankly, is inexplicable in every sense, pardoned him.>I still don’t understand how that happened. You don’t, either? You’re telling me that you don’t have an explanation?There is what Trump himself said, which is that this was a Biden frame-up because technically Hernández was convicted and sentenced during the Biden years. Again, that flies in the face of everything we know about how the case against Hernández was built during the first Trump administration.Hernández, at a certain point, wrote an obsequious letter to Trump that Roger Stone delivered to him, basically comparing both of them to victims of American justice run amok.
>>525814783>Wipe them all off.Even the Sacklers?
>>525814010Do you people not look at anything that is happening anywhere else in the world at all? The reason for this shit was CHINA.Did you know, Chinese state run media talk about the invasion of America all the fucking time? You don't know about it because you obviously haven't looked into it. But on Chinese TV right now there is someone talking about how they're going to build military bases in latin America, which is what China will use to launch it's invasion of America. Just go and google Chi Haotians speech if you want to know what Chinas plan for America is.This is why Trump is going hard on Venezuela and talking about doing the same to other countries. Because China is planning to attack America through south America. Shit nigger it's not hard to figure this out.
>>525815081None of these things justify the pardoning of Hernández — least of all at a time when the current administration is saying the reason they ousted Maduro from power and brought him to the United States for trial is because he’s a narco-terrorist. These are exactly the same charges brought against Hernández.So it pretty much voids any pretense that American interests right now in Venezuela have to do with stemming the drug trade. The randomness of how the administration shifted from a not illegitimate concern about fentanyl labs in parts of Mexico, say, to the indiscriminate bombing of small drug boats in the Caribbean is really a product of a political calculation, above all.>Well, you say what they want to do is something “kinetic,” which is the Orwellian way that violence gets described in military action.Yes.>It seems to me that what they wanted to do was something that was a spectacle. There is a certain amount of governing or propagandizing or signal sending through spectacle.>With the release of the drone videos — you see the eradication and killing of these people on these boats — they were looking for something that was televisual. They were looking for something that worked as vertical video on X. The photos of the makeshift situation room at Mar-a-Lago during this operation have a huge screen showing X with a search for Venezuela on it. The photos they released of Maduro — the whole thing seems so built around spectacle.
>>525815192>I think you have to see this as “propaganda through force.” That might have been one of your pieces or, certainly, in somebody’s piece that I read in preparing for this.Exactly. That was a phrase used by a former Trump administration official in describing this.It’s also worth pointing out what was happening in the United States at the time, at the start of these boat bombings. There was also an increased militarization in American cities like Los Angeles and Chicago related to this immigration crackdown.One thing that a number of officials have made the point to me, and I think it’s well taken, is that the general logic here is making military action a daily presence in American life in every sense. As you say, it’s visual, it’s kind of atmospheric. So this was all happening simultaneously.The strangeness, to my mind, about how Venezuela emerges as this particular target that serves all of these different political ends is that there were different factions within the Trump administration that actually had different views on how the United States should engage with Venezuela.It’s a genuinely complicated question. You have a repressive, dictatorial president who does have ties to the drug trade — there’s no question — who refused to recognize a democratic election, who has done all of these obviously horrific crimes. How do you engage with him?
>>525815099>Chinese state run media talk about the invasion of America all the fucking time? >You don't know about it because you obviously haven't looked into it. >But on Chinese TV right now there is someone talking about how they're going to build military bases in latin AmericaInteresting if all this is true. I have no way to verify it of course
>>525815249There are longstanding sanctions. Those sanctions seem to be immiserating the population but haven’t really dislodged Maduro himself from power. Previous diplomatic efforts have all run up against the bottom line that Maduro would never negotiate his own ouster. That has always been a diplomatic catch in any broader design for the region.So there was an element within the Trump administration early on that favored a more conciliatory approach. It was epitomized by Richard Grenell, a special envoy who flew down to Caracas, met with Maduro, and achieved some small successes. For example, he got the Venezuelan government to release Americans held in Venezuelan prisons and convinced the Venezuelan government to start accepting deportation flights from the United States.So there were these incremental achievements or gains made from that more conciliatory approach. But someone like Grenell was quickly outgunned by the combination of Rubio and his ideological vision for the region and regime change, and people like Miller, who brought these other concerns to the issue.It’s kind of a weird confluence of the different interests of people at play, such that this becomes a kind of natural target. And the one through line, I would say, given the differences among the various actors involved inside the administration, was the question: At the end of the day, what would the fallout actually be for the administration if it started to take increasingly aggressive action against Venezuela?
>>525815099> Chitler invading the USALawdy lawd, I juss can't keep track o' awl dem hitlers now. Anybody have a field guide?
>>525815359Maduro is an international pariah. Venezuela is not a country that’s contiguous with the United States in the way that Mexico is.Not to make this sound too simple, but I have to say I’ve been struck in some of my conversations with people on the inside describing that the thinking was boiling down to: Can this really hurt us that badly? As if this is a perfect theater for us to experiment in these ways because the blowback won’t be as substantial as it would be elsewhere.>The Trump administration has described what they think could go right here — which is that you have a pliant government in Venezuela that does what we want them to do, which leads to more oil exports, which leads to fewer migrant outflows.>It seems like a tall order. But what could go wrong here? If we’re looking back in a couple of years, and this looks like a signal catastrophe, what happened?I would say there are two ways of grouping the categories of what could go wrong — because there’s just a vast amount of things that could go wrong.The first would be: Let’s say Maduro has been removed and now the administration has elevated a hard-liner in Delcy Rodríguez to this new role as interim president. In this world, where the U.S. now basically begs off or drifts away, you have a regime in Venezuela that is even harder line, that’s been backed into a corner, that’s going to crack down in even new ways on the Venezuelan population that’s there. And what you’ve effectively done is you’ve really neutered the political opposition in the country after years of the Venezuelan opposition really trying to assert itself and trying to build a popular mandate.
>>525815423It has always been a problem for the Venezuelan opposition: finding a way of continuing to seem relevant to the Venezuelan people, when even after they win elections, the government just refuses to recognize those results, and everyone goes back to the status quo.>The Venezuelan opposition leader just won the Nobel Peace Prize and dedicated it to Donald Trump. But Trump just dismissed her, saying that she doesn’t have the juice to run the country.Dismissed her, yes. That was always the concern for María Corina Machado, the Nobel laureate and leader of the Venezuelan opposition — an incredibly charismatic figure who wasn’t the candidate who stood for election in 2024. She had been barred from running for office. Instead it was someone she backed, a diplomat, an older, statelier diplomat, who I think won in large part because of Machado’s advocacy for him and her presence and her courage.Her particular gambit has been that the only way to meaningfully get rid of Maduro is to depend on the direct foreign intervention of the United States. But there was always this concern that if you put all of your stock in the idea that the Americans are going to come dislodge the regime and usher in some sort of democratic restoration, when Trump doesn’t do that, you are discredited, and you are marginalized — which seems to be what’s happening.So the first order of bad outcomes is exactly this: The administration in some form or another persists. The hard-liners continue to exert major influence in the country, relatively unchecked. There are further domestic crackdowns. And the Venezuelan opposition, such as it is, is now completely at sea.
>>525815476The other universe of possibilities is that there is a power vacuum. Because there’s a careful, precarious balance to how the current situation is persisting: You have a group of armed vigilante groups called colectivos who have essentially operated at the behest of the regime but are in some ways free agents. You have elements of the military who are very paranoid about their standing, who have access, obviously, to weapons, to drugs, to money. You have a contingent of Colombian rebels operating along the border. You have the potential for an immense amount of uncontrolled violence and intense ongoing factionalism. And if you remove one piece from this equation, all hell will break loose.These are just tamer summaries of some of the possibilities. But the potential outcomes could be quite grave.Frankly, I don’t know what’s coming. I don’t know what it means for the current administration to say, as it has in explicit terms: If Delcy Rodríguez, the now acting president, doesn’t do what we want her to do, she’ll suffer a fate worse than Maduro’s.It’s hard to imagine any government, least of all a government full of Chavistas, who have consolidated all of this power for decades now, just acceding to the idea that they’re just puppets of an American administration.Certainly, when it comes to American intervention in the region, there are a thousand cautionary tales of what it means for the United States to have this kind of prolonged involvement in the country, and what’s more, to take this kind of aggressive military action.Needless to say, we haven’t talked about the fact that there was no congressional authorization for this.
>>525810243just like in Ukraine!!! I remember when Putin arrested Zelenskyy and...wait...
>>525815536>Incredible violation of international law.Exactly. Take your pick.>Maduro is a bad guy. He’s a genuinely bad guy. But there are a lot of bad guys leading countries. As Donald Trump has said before, he has exchanged love letters with Kim Jong-un.>I don’t want to defend Nicolás Maduro. He is bad. On the other hand, this is clearly not a standard that we are applying across the world.> we did start applying that — America truly as the world’s policeman — should we go arrest the leader of Saudi Arabia for killing a journalist who was writing for The Washington Post and allegedly hacking him up with a bone saw?This is your point, too, about the history of American involvement in the wider region in Latin America. The United States government propped up some of the worst actors for decades.>We’re negotiating with Putin right now.Exactly.
>>525815659>I want to get at a bigger-picture point that reflects the oil, the drugs, the socialist leader of Venezuela and the Marco Rubio domino theory about Cuba.>This feels like a war or an operation, whatever you want to call it, out of the 1980s. Out of a time when the big drug is cocaine. Out of a time when the global economy is dependent on oil as opposed to moving to renewable energy supply chains — which China is racing ahead of us on and Trump is devastating in America. Out of a time when there’s more fear that socialism might be on the rise and be an attractive ideology to people. Nobody is looking at Venezuela as a successful country that might inspire a lot of imitators.>I can run through the constellation of arguments being made in favor of this. But they all have this quality of being adjacent to reality as it is now.>There’s an energy argument, but the energy argument is the one that would have made sense in the ’80s. We are a huge energy exporter at this point. America is not dependent on others. We do not have an energy independence problem. And to the extent we do have a problem with the future, it is that China is wrecking us right now on things like the solar supply chain. The expectation is not that the future will be won by whoever has access to the deepest oil reserves.>Again, fentanyl — not cocaine — is the drug problem.
>>525815745>There just isn’t a huge problem with socialist strongmen taking power all over Latin America. It’s a disaster for the Venezuelan people, but that’s a somewhat different issue from, at least, the American perspective.>There just seems to be something slightly out of time about it.It’s a great observation. The ’80s overlay is particularly striking to me, too, when you think about the immigration policies coming out of this administration. The hostility to immigrants in general, in many ways, is an attempt to rewrite some of the policies written in the 1980s, like the Refugee Act of 1980. That has been all but gutted. The idea of asylum refugee practice — gone.One of the great ironies, to me, in Trump’s new view of alliances in the region, is his alliance with Nayib Bukele, the authoritarian president of El Salvador. I’m thinking particularly, among other things, about how when the administration first invoked the Alien Enemies Act, it sent a group of some 250 Venezuelans accused — in almost every case, without basis or evidence — of belonging to this Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison. The Salvadoran government got $5 million to hold them for an indefinite period of time. They were brutally tortured, they were held incommunicado.
>>525815801To someone like me, who spends a lot of time thinking about the long sweep of American foreign policy and immigration policy and how they’re intertwined over time, it was incredibly striking to see, particularly during the first Trump term, villainizing immigrants on the basis that many of the Central American immigrants who had arrived in the United States in recent years were somehow members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13. Never mind that it began in the United States and was a scourge that defined the region in the early 2000s and led to large numbers of people showing up at the border during the first Trump administration.Now you have Venezuelans being accused by the government of belonging to a Venezuelan gang. The target has just changed. Now the ally in prosecuting that case, just as it had been in the ’80s, was a hard-line Salvadoran regime in the region that, I think, in some ways, Trump really wants to emulate.In some sense, it’s ridiculous to suggest that the president of El Salvador right now is a model for Trump, given just his unrivaled power on the world stage. But one of the things that the Salvadoran government has done in recent years has been to basically suspend the constitution and run the country from month to month in what has been called a state of exception. That is almost exactly what the Trump administration fantasizes about in ways both literal and figurative.
>>525815838So in terms of why that mode of thinking still seems to appeal to Trump and to some of his hard-line ideologues, I can see it as a throwback to an era of American interventionism and unbridled sort of demonstrations of force and power.There’s been reporting about the fact that Maduro, as an attempt to placate the Trump administration, basically offered his country’s oil up to the administration. The administration refused it, which again raises the question of this being more about a show of force. It’s a very strange thing.But I think you’re right: A lot of the ideological thinking around this has a kind of hoary, ’80s-era element. If you poke it a little bit further, particularly in the context of Venezuela and this sort of domino theory almost in reverse — if you topple a socialist regime in the region, then others will fall — you really start to see the radicalism of this old hard-line Rubio position on Cuba, which he has not really budged on in his time in public office. He has always been utterly hard-line and stubborn on the question of needing to overthrow the Cuban government. And again, that’s very old-world, backward looking.I mean, this is not to defend the abuses of the Cuban government, which are obscene in every sense. But it is a mode of thinking that is very dated.
>>525810243Day 10 of shills still seething that their Maduro bucks have stopped.
>>525815936>How do you understand who is now running Venezuela?>What Trump and Rubio agree on in their somewhat different statements is that the acting president of Venezuela has to do what we want her to do.>So what do we want her to do?I don’t exactly know what the U.S. expectation is for Delcy Rodríguez, the interim president.>Have we done a lot of planning about how to run Venezuela?It does not seem to me to be the case.Delcy Rodríguez, the acting president of Venezuela, is a strange person for the U.S. to elevate. Delcy Rodríguez is someone who, before Maduro was in power, was basically a middling government bureaucrat during the regime of Chávez.Her fortunes changed when Maduro came to office. Her brother became the chief political strategist for Maduro, and she, with him, started to have an increasingly active role in overseeing his government.At a certain point, she was in charge of the foreign ministry. Then she became in charge of the economy and eventually took on the oil portfolio. She was widely regarded as someone who was politically ruthless, someone who was a true believer, one of the most loyal and ideological members of the regime.Her father had been tortured and killed at the hands of a pro-U.S. Venezuelan administration, and it has been said that she’s always harbored a sense of aggrievement and victimhood as a result of that.She is, for all of her ruthlessness, also known to have managed somewhat competently under the circumstances in trying — given this terrible hand the country has been dealt economically — to stabilize inflation, trying to increase oil production.
>>525816068But she’s someone who is deeply implicated in all of the gravest misdeeds of the administration of the regime. For example, her brother was the person responsible basically for forcing through the fraudulent election of 2024.So she is basically at the center of all of the most controversial elements of the Maduro regime and its actions — and, naturally, during Trump’s first term, was actually sanctioned for this by the Trump administration.>Amazing how things work out.Yes. As one former Trump administration official told me: If your whole logic has been that Maduro is an illegitimate president and that his regime is illegitimate, what does it mean to remove him and then replace him with his No. 2 — someone who is implicated in every misdeed of the Maduro regime?I know that there is a complicated problem the administration has to solve, and this has always been on the table — and was always one of the reasons the United States shouldn’t have gotten involved as precipitously as it has — and that is: It’s not clear the best way forward without Maduro.
>>525816115The Venezuelan opposition won national elections in 2024, but the country is still in the stranglehold of the regime and the military. And the opposition figures who won that 2024 election and who now have this prominent role on the international stage make the existing powers in the country very uncomfortable.So there’s always going to be this question of whether or not the Venezuelan opposition can coexist with the hard-line elements of the military that remain acting in the country and don’t want any of their interests touched. That was always going to be a conundrum under any circumstance if the current leadership was removed.So the logic seems to be that in picking someone like Delcy Rodríguez to be the interim figure, that calms the nerves of the key players in the military and the government, the interior minister, the head of the armed forces.But those guys aren’t naive. Those guys certainly see what course this puts them on — particularly when the administration is now being explicit about the fact that if Rodríguez does anything that the administration doesn’t like, they’ll remove her.I guess the thinking seems to be that will spook people into maybe agreeing to leave the country. But that has never really been the case.It’s very, very unclear what the broader calculus is here.
>>525816157>It all reminds me a lot of Iraq. Though I’m not saying that these countries are the same — they do not have the same internal divisions. I’m not saying it will go the same way.>Over the past years, I have read a number of books trying to reconstruct how America ended up in this completely optional, chosen war in Iraq.>One of the things you see when you begin to try to answer the question of why we ended up doing that is that there was no single answer. There were a bunch of factions that each had their own reason for wanting this done, and as an accumulation, it was enough to push the decision-making over the finish line.>The people who hated Saddam Hussein for humanitarian reasons; the people who really did believe in weapons of mass destruction; the people who wanted the oil; the people who wanted to export democracy; the people who wanted to show the world that America was back and you couldn’t mess with us; George W. Bush’s: This guy tried to kill my dad.>Not one of these reasons was good enough, but all of them together created enough pressure that it ended up happening.>This has that strange emergent quality to me. Invading Venezuela for the oil is stupid because we don’t need oil at the moment, and oil prices are low, and we shouldn’t invade countries for oil anyway, and the global energy system is moving over.>Invading Venezuela because Maduro is bad: Well, there are a lot of bad leaders around the world, and that’s against international law anyway.>Invading Venezuela because we have a drug problem: Our drug problem just isn’t cocaine.
>>525816277>Invading Venezuela because we’re trying to destabilize a supporter of Cuba: Again, that’s absurd — but it is Marco Rubio’s position, in part.>Every single one of these is so far beneath the level that would lead to America deposing the leader of another country with truly unpredictable results and also no effort to manufacture consensus in the country, no significant postwar planning or thought to: What if the whole thing just doesn’t work?>You can track back how we got here, but no thread is clear enough to also then explain what level of commitment or even what governing interests we are going to have in the aftermath — in a way that just makes me very nervous.>Again, I’m not saying it goes the way Iraq did, but it just reminds me of that in that respect.To come back to a point you made earlier, I think it’s all very well taken. I also think it’s just so much the product of the personalities involved.In some ways, that’s the scariest prospect here: That it’s the happenstance confluence of individual positions or predispositions of particular people, none of whom, I think it’s fair to say, are people of a high degree of integrity.
>>525816360We’re talking about someone like Pete Hegseth, whose primary concern, as I understand it in this configuration, is to get on Miller’s good side. So maybe that conditions his acquiescence to Miller’s harder line in a way that a previous secretary of defense would draw a line and say no.You’ve got Rubio with this age-old ideological obsession that aligns with a jaundiced view that Trump has of the world that harks back to the ’80s — but at the same time also represents a misunderstanding of recent developments.I asked this question to one former Trump administration official just the other day. This person had been involved in a lot of the decision-making around Venezuela in the first Trump term.I said: What has changed? Trump initially was reticent to get involved in this direct, overt way. Now, obviously, he’s delighting in it. How do you explain that shift? The only thing I see that has changed is that there was a rationale in the first Trump term that we need to establish democracy or support democracy in the region. Now that’s not even on the table. There isn’t even a gesture made in that direction.The person went on to enumerate the fact that some recent developments that all occurred during the Biden years and that were obsessions for Trump, in a certain sense, can seem to be aligned with the Venezuela issue.The rise in overdose deaths — to your point, that’s fentanyl, that is not cocaine. But it doesn’t matter in the rough logic of the current administration.There’s the idea of the immigration problem. Sure, there are a large number of Venezuelans who have arrived in the United States in recent years. But an intervention like this does not curb the immigration issue at all. In fact, if anything, it unleashes another dimension of it.There are all these very notional ideas that Trump has latched on to, and they reflect a warped vision of what’s happening in the region.
>>525816444>There’s also supposed to be an idea pushing in the other direction. We keep talking about Trump and what Trump wants, but something that Trump said in his often contradictory but nevertheless repetitive way was that he doesn’t want more wars, he doesn’t want more foreign entanglements.>He ran in 2016 as an opponent of the Iraq war. We can argue about whether or not he actually was when that was happening, but he certainly ran as a critic of it in 2016.>One thing we were endlessly told by MAGA-line figures in this period was that the good thing about Donald Trump is that if he’s in office, he’s not going to waste American blood or treasure going off on adventures in other countries where we don’t know how they’ll end up.>The bulwark on this was supposed to be a MAGA isolationism. What happened to that?I don’t know that this is a meaningful response, per se, but there is a kind of hermetic logic to the MAGA view of things and to Trump’s view of things in particular. It’s a little bit the idea that action has to be taken to continue to prop up some of the lies and some of the talking points that have come to define Trump’s most visible public positions.So if you’re always talking about the fact that immigrants are criminals and that specifically Venezuelan immigrants are members of a violent gang, and that violent gang is invading the country, and it’s invading the country at the hands of a foreign dictator who’s trying to sow discord and instability through immigration — if you follow that through to its logical conclusion — if we put the word “logical” in scare quotes — you have something like this direct confrontation with Maduro and, eventually, his ouster.The fact that there were no lives lost among American soldiers in this operation, I think, contributes to the sense inside the administration that this was a resounding success.
>>525816540>Because we know these things are judged the moment you capture the sovereign of the country. [Laughs.]It’s truly mind-bending. There’s no way around it. But his whole political brand seems to be built on the idea of his strength and that we’re returning to an era of the Monroe Doctrine.>Can you say quickly what the Monroe Doctrine is?The Monroe Doctrine, from the 1800s, is the idea that any foreign involvement in the Western Hemisphere will prompt American reprisals or action, that the United States is in charge of the Western Hemisphere, and it will act accordingly. And that gave rise to a series of American interventions in the region and this view that the U.S. is the police force for the Western Hemisphere.To your question, this seems to fly in the face of the MAGA idea of the importance of isolationism and avoidance of international conflicts, etc. But I think so much of it also speaks to this issue of presidential power and this idea of unapologetic muscle flexing and so on.Again, I’m casting about for explanations for a series of actions that I don’t think have a logical or substantive explanation. But I’m trying to imagine what the thinking is in the White House where they’re embarking on a project that is extraordinarily complicated and there have been a number of offramps.I expected the boat bombings and the intercepting of oil ships to continue for several months more before there was direct military action on the ground in Venezuela. I was surprised by the suddenness of this — not necessarily by the outcome, because the administration has been explicit about always wanting to do this sort of thing. But I sort of half-expected all along that there would be some way of drawing down this conflict and declaring victory and moving on to the next thing.But that’s clearly not how these guys think.
>>525810243>3 hoursIt was over in 3 minutes
>>525816603>How much do you buy there being a “Wag the Dog” dimension to this?>Trump is down in the polls. The 2025 elections were, across the board, horrendous for Republicans. Anybody reading punditry over the new year was reading piece after piece about the weakening, the shrinking, of Donald Trump: The Trump era is already beginning to end. You’re already seeing the fractures in MAGA.>There has been an overwhelming narrative that Trump is a lame duck of some sort, and that he has lost control of the agenda. There’s an affordability crisis, and he doesn’t have an affordability plan.>Given that this is something they have actually signaled they wanted to do, to what degree do you buy the argument that this is simply Trump attempting to reassert control as the forceful actor of history?>This is his affordability agenda. Because, in theory, one day oil will be cheaper.>He’s now talking about Greenland again. Maybe you can’t pass much in Congress, but maybe you can take territory and show that the world is under your thumb.>Do you buy that?I don’t quite know, frankly.I keep going back to the idea of “propaganda through force,” which is the phrase of a former Trump administration official who put this in a political context that I thought was helpful. Which is that there always has to be some ongoing conflict where the president gets to demonstrate his power, his sense of control, his authority.
>>525810243Unlike the EU who bought $300 billion worth of oil from Putler Venezula won't be able to export anything we don't want them to. Once the oil money runs out the socialists can't pay their thugs who keep them in charge.
>>525816724In that sense, I do think this is kind of tailor made for him in this moment. It’s an issue that he gets to bang the drum on. He gets to say that the Venezuelan government is now taking orders from us. He gets to say that this guy, Maduro, whom he’s talked about ad nauseam for being a horrible person, is finally out.My understanding of what the administration has done in Venezuela is that it was not an idle outgrowth of this sense of: We need to do something to revive our brand. I think this is something that has been brewing for a while. To your earlier point, I think it was a bunch of different things that finally aligned at the right moment that allowed for this situation to escalate as quickly as it did.So I do think that this was already set in motion, but I think it’s a very useful political prop for the president.Of course, I hear myself saying this, and I’m aghast at the idea that this kind of intervention is a “prop,” but I do think that for the administration it is useful in that sense. I certainly think they view it that way.
Kek he looks like William Hartnell
>>525816759>Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?My first would be a novel called “The Known World” by Edward P. Jones, about antebellum Virginia. It’s one of the most astonishing novels I’ve ever read, one of my favorite American novels. I cannot recommend it highly enough.My second recommendation is a memoir by Carolyn Forché called “What You Have Heard Is True.” When she was 27, she was living in El Salvador at the start of what became the Salvadoran civil war, and it’s a reflection on what that period was like for her. It’s incredibly haunting and beautiful — and very much relevant to the current conversation.My last recommendation would be “The Spy and the Traitor” by Ben Macintyre, from several years back, about a Soviet double agent who was working for the K.G.B. but who became a double agent for British intelligence during the Cold War. Absolutely astonishing true story that reads like fiction.>Jonathan Blitzer, thank you very much.Thanks again for having me.
